The Weekend Report

Booty Call … Yoo Hoo Noo

The urban comedy Think Like a Man held onto the top spot in its sophomore session with an estimated $17.8 million in a session that featured a quartet of new national releases. The Newcomers that were bunched in the top five included the stop motion animation of The Pirates! Band of Misfits and the rom-com The Five Year Engagement that opened respectively to $11.4 million and $11.1 million.

A little bit further down the list were the testosterone thriller Safe that grossed $7.6 million and the nevermore whodunit The Raven with $7.2 million. Indian imports provided solid returns for Tamil Dammu of $243,000 and indifferent response for Hindi Tezz of $148,000. In Quebec Derapage provided a listless $142,000 box office at 58 locations.

Exclusive bows were largely fungible with the exception of the Jack Black vehicle Bernie that tallied $88,200 at three venues and the Norwegian thriller Headhunters that racked up $41,100 from four engagements.

Cusp of summer box office experienced a lull with weekend revenues of roughly $115 million that amounted to a 17% decline from the prior frame. It was a steeper 30% downturn from 2011 when the bow of Fast Five blew away the competition with an $86.1 million launch.

The weekend’s big noise was happening overseas with The Avengers getting a jump start on domestic with a 39 territory debut estimated at close to $180 million. Also heaping up advance gelt internationally is Battleship with $150 million to date prior to its North American bow on 5/18.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits entered its fifth weekend internationally with $70 million and performed pretty much to tracking pegged at between $11 million and $14 million. To no great surprise exit demos identified the audience as 76% family. It also tilted slightly female with 54%.

The Five Year Engagement arrived below expectations of $15 million to $18 million. Again exit demos were as expected with 57% of viewers aged 30 years and older and a female tilt of 64%. As with Wanderlust two months back this stripe of yucks and kisses seems to be a formula that’s rapidly losing its appeal.

Holdover titles generally experienced 50% drops and apart from The Hunger Games look to be swept out by the incoming summer tentpoles. Yet to be determined is the fate of alternative adult fare that’s been strengthening during the hot months as Midnight in Paris proved in extremis with a $55 million domestic tally.

“Chad Harbach spent ten years writing his novel. It was his avocation, for which he was paid nothing, with no guarantee he’d ever be paid anything, while he supported himself doing freelance work, for which I don’t think he ever made $30,000 a year. I sold his book for an advance that equated to $65,000 a year—before taxes and commission—for each of the years of work he’d put in. The law schools in this country churn out first-year associates at white-shoe firms that pay them $250,000 a year, when they’re twenty-five years of age, to sit at a desk doing meaningless bullshit to grease the wheels of the corporatocracy, and people get upset about an excellent author getting $65,000 a year? Give me a fucking break.”
~ Book Agent Chris Parris-Lamb On The State Of The Publishing Industry

INTERVIEWERDo you think this anxiety of yours has something to do with being a woman? Do you have to work harder than a male writer, just to create work that isn’t dismissed as being “for women”? Is there a difference between male and female writing?

FERRANTE
I’ll answer with my own story. As a girl—twelve, thirteen years old—I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me. That phase ended after a couple of years. At fifteen I began to write stories about brave girls who were in serious trouble. But the idea remained—indeed, it grew stronger—that the greatest narrators were men and that one had to learn to narrate like them. I devoured books at that age, and there’s no getting around it, my models were masculine. So even when I wrote stories about girls, I wanted to give the heroine a wealth of experiences, a freedom, a determination that I tried to imitate from the great novels written by men. I didn’t want to write like Madame de La Fayette or Jane Austen or the Brontës—at the time I knew very little about contemporary literature—but like Defoe or Fielding or Flaubert or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or even Hugo. While the models offered by women novelists were few and seemed to me for the most part thin, those of male novelists were numerous and almost always dazzling. That phase lasted a long time, until I was in my early twenties, and it left profound effects.
~ Elena Ferrante, Paris Review Art Of Fiction No. 228